


Samsara

by wombuttress



Category: Dragon Age - All Media Types, Dragon Age: Origins
Genre: M/M, Multi, Reincarnation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-28
Updated: 2017-01-24
Packaged: 2018-09-12 19:00:57
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 9
Words: 15,327
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9085759
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wombuttress/pseuds/wombuttress
Summary: They come into the dungeon. Wardens, Jowan realizes, recognizing the silver griffon on their breastplates. A dwarf leads them, and her eyes fall on him. “Jowan!”Jowan stares, uncomprehending. He has never met a dwarf before. He has certainly never met this dwarf before.“What, you don’t recognize me?” The dwarf grins. “It’s me, Amell!”(The wheels keeps on turning. Back into the dark waters they go, and up they come again, again and again and again.)--What if the Warden was aware of it every time you started a new game?





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> What if the Warden was aware of it every time you started a new game?

 

# I.

 

**AN ANCIENT CURSE: MAY YOU SEE CLEARLY**

 

When Amell is eleven, a boy sits next to her in her corner. _Her_ corner, she thinks irritably. She squints at him, taking in his greasy hair and his hunched shoulders, jaw clenching.

 _Rat,_ she thinks, uncharitably.

He moves like one, too. Quick and quiet. Fidgety. And he approaches her, glancing nervously at her. He talks, squeaky and hushed, about friends or some other kids who had said something mean to him. Or maybe it’s some Templars. She doesn’t listen.

“Do you mind if I sit here?” he asks. “No one else comes here, so…”

“Sure. Fine.”

Then, at least, he is quiet for a while. She reads; he sits there and stares at the floor. It’s not a terrible set-up, until he starts talking more. Something about how he’s been there for a while and friends and older apprentices and—well, she doesn’t really pay attention.

“Oh, I’m sorry… I’m interrupting you…”

She responds without really thinking. “It’s fine. You can keep talking.”

“Oh, thanks! I’m—”

She regrets it instantly. She doesn’t actually wanted him to keep talking. With effort, at least, she lets his words wash over her while keeping her attention on her book.

Except then, he approaches her at breakfast the next morning, eyes bright and voice squeaking.

“Good morning!” he says. “I was thinking…”

Luckily, she still has her book.

After that, his presence becomes a consistent factor in her life, always finding her in all her little nooks. He’s not bad enough for her to want to leave whatever spot she had found at the moment, so she endures, and acclimates.

“You’re always reading,” he says one time.

She doesn’t bothered to respond to that, but just flips a page.

“That’s cool,” he says, sounding genuine. “You must be really smart.”

“Yeah,” she says absentmindedly.

“So, uh,” he says. “Do you have any friends, or…?”

She bristles. “No. I don’t.”

“Well, okay,” the boy says, smiling brightly. “We can be friends! Right?”

She bristles again. From the few peeks she’d taken over the top of the books she read she’d already noticed this kid was a loser—he didn’t have friends, either. And he’d picked her because she didn’t, as though they were the _same._

The thing about _friends,_ though, was that you still had to have some, or you really were a loser.

“Friends,” she relents. “Yeah.”

He beams at her, all crooked teeth. She goes back to reading.

Her new friend—her very first friend, actually—turns out to be named _Jowan._

 

_\--_

 

Over the years of their pitiful friendship, Amell learns little of Jowan. He isn’t smart. He isn’t clever. He isn’t good at magic, either, because he can’t stop whining for three consecutive seconds to focus on his studies. On top of that, he’s always in some kind of annoying trouble, getting yelled at or pranked or failing some test. Which inevitably leads him crawling to her.

Amell _is_ smart. She _is_ clever. She _is_ good at magic. Compared to her, Jowan has nothing to offer—except that he’s willing to tell her all that, that she’s smart and clever and good at magic. And, well, that he’s there. Constantly.

There’s no one else. She doesn't _want_ anyone else. She doesn't even want him. 

But they are friends, of a kind.

Until her Harrowing, and the Fade, and the rat scurrying around her dream. The rat who pretends friendship while waiting to devour her. The pathetic creature, waiting to undo her.

She wins, of course she does. She is smart, and clever, and good at magic, and there was never any question of her success. She lays in her bed, triumphant and prideful--

And then Jowan is there.

Of course he is. He's always there. Her glowing mood tanks as he pries for information, mumbling (he always _mumbles)_ about how worried he is for his own Harrowing, vomiting up all his fears and anxieties--as though she cares.

She brushes him off. She’s a full mage now. She has business to be getting to.

But Jowan will not let her be. He has some Chantry girl, and a madcap scheme of escape. She hardly listens, picking up on _phylactery_ and _Tranquil,_ and then, _blood magic._

She’d spent enough time with him to notice the way his eyes flicked slightly as he glosses over that information. Blood magic.

“Is that true?” she asks. “About you being a blood mage?”

Nine years. She has known him nine years, almost half her lifetime. Of course she can detect even the slightest hesitation in his voice, the slightest jitter betraying a lie.

“Of course not!” he says. “I…”

Amell’s eyes narrow.

_Rat._

\--

 

She tells Irving immediately. No question. Blood magic could not be tolerated. She has a duty, which she considers well fulfilled--until Irving requires she go with them.

It isn’t her place to question his orders, even if she doesn’t follow his logic. She keeps that in mind as she runs through the corridors, heart racing, fighting guards—Irving hadn’t told her there would be guards. Maker, she _hates_ combat magic. She’s no good under pressure, and her bolts never manage to fly straight.

What she hates more, though, is Jowan and his rotund girlfriend putting their sweaty hands on her. Concerned that she’d hurt herself, after she’d been knocked unconscious, as though that was any of their business.

“Later,” Amell says, teeth grit. “I’m fine.”

But they’re successful. Jowan crushes his phylactery, and the way his eyes light up feels like a punch to the gut.

“I’m free now!” he says. “Lily, we’re free!”

Amell stands off to the side, and shuts her eyes. When she opens them, she realized she must have been visibly grimacing. Jowan has turned his cow-eyed stare of concern on her.

“You can come with us,” Jowan says eagerly. “Even if they have your phylactery, we can—”

She lets him chatter, setting her jaw. It would be over soon. Her life would resume its steady course—except now, it would be quieter.

 

\--

 

Why did _nothing_ ever go according to plan?

Amell, being rowed out across Calenhad, set to begin her new life as a Grey Warden, thinks of Mouse.

_The best laid plans..._

\--

 

Amell is not very good at being a Grey Warden. She is not very good at being outside—so much open space, nowhere to hide, always having to keep moving. Neither is she any good at speaking to other people when she hasn’t known them all her life. She can’t seem to stop making people angry for no reason. She is not very good at being a combat mage. Or at being any kind of mage at all, now that magic is all practice, no theory. Or putting up with Alistair’s jokes, or with Leliana’s religious drivel, or with Morrigan’s constant sniping.

She has slipped from star pupil to complete dunderhead. Maker, she's like _Jowan_ now.

She should never have left the Tower. She never would have, if it weren't for _him!_

By the time she arrives in Redcliffe, her jaw hurts from all the clenching. Her attempts at rallying the townsfolk had not been as stellar as she had hoped, and now look--so many of them were dead. Amell is nearly inclined to feel guilty, but it’s their own fault, for not standing and fighting for each other. It has nothing to do with her. Why should she be responsible for their lives?

She ruminates on this, passing through Redcliffe’s dungeons. She crosses a threshold, and sees a figure hunched over at the back of a cell, obscured by the dark. And when the figure stands and comes forward, a face, a voice—

“It’s you!”

—a familiar, grating voice.

“Jowan,” Amell says, coldly.

It doesn’t take long to devolve into shouting.

“You betrayed me!”

“You became a _blood mage!”_

“I made a mistake, alright?” His voice cracks. “And I’m paying for it! I’ve slept in ditches, in rotten logs—”

“That’s _not_ my problem.”

It’s nearly half an hour before she manages to get him to say anything useful about the situation in the castle. She glares, hoarse, her eyes feeling strangely itchy.

“You’ll stay here for now,” she says. “I’ll—I’ll…”

She doesn’t make promises, silently stomping out of the dungeon and up the stairs. She is going to sort this out.

 

\--

 

She sorts it out.

More or less.

Self-defense, she tells herself over the boy’s bleeding corpse. The demon had attacked her.  The boy had been weak and foolish, and allowed the demon to attack her. She'd only done what she'd had to do. Lady Isolde clutches the body and screams, her shrill voice daggers in Amell’s ears. 

She doesn’t want to face the main courtyard, so she’s forced to pass Jowan’s cell on her way out. He stirs.

“What happened?” he asks softly.

She stops, refusing to look at him. When the right words to explain don’t come, she marches forward without a second glance.

She _will_ sort this out.

 

\--

 

The Arl thanks her, gaunt and haggard but alive and awake and grateful. As he should be. She’d gone through so much trouble to get those foolish Ashes for him. He _should_ be grateful.

He offers her a boon.

“I’ll think of something later,” she says brusquely. The arl begins to turn away. She hesitates. “Actually,” she says quickly. “There is one thing. The mage you have in the cellar. He’s just a hapless fool. Not a real threat. And we were...I knew him, in the Circle. I’d like you to let him go.”

“The blood mage?” The Arl frowns. “That I cannot do. The man is a traitor and an attempted murderer—and a maleficar. The Templars have already been notified.”

“What?” Amell blinks, stunned. “But—what will happen to him?”

The Arl has already lost interest. “Whatever it is they do to maleficarum in the Circle, I expect.”

Tranquility, then. Or death.

Jowan is a rat, but he had been her friend. She opens her mouth to say something. Anything.

_I am a Grey Warden of Ferelden, and you owe me your life! Do as I say!_

Amell hasn’t managed to convince a single person of a single thing. People just don’t listen to her. They never have. She is neither charming nor persuasive. What can she say to this Arl? And for what? Some rat?

She drops her eyes.

“I see,” she says eventually. “I suppose, then, that it is--for the best. Yes.”

She had hoped she wouldn’t see him again, but they haul him up before the Arl one final time, and Amell is still present.

He accepts the well-earned blame without compunction, and turns to her. She braces herself, ready to be shouted at, hated.

Jowan smiles sadly, and apologizes for letting her down, and leaves her feeling furious, empty, and rather like she has been kicked by a horse.

 

\--

 

Amell’s return to Kinloch does not fare well.

In the Fade, Wynne falls first. Then Alistair. Morrigan is struck down last, buying Amell some extra time with her last blast of protective magic. Funny—just an hour ago, they had been screaming at each other. Amell had told Morrigan to get out of her sight forever at first opportunity. Morrigan had indicated at a shriek that she'd be glad to oblige.

She hadn't liked her wretched, annoying companions, but now that they were gone, Amell feels a yawning emptiness. She would have to survive this fight alone.

She doesn't.

When the last blow comes, Amell doesn't see it coming. There’s a flash of white, and she flails—magic ripping through her, scorching her—and then, everything grows quiet.

She stumbles forward, slipping in her own hot blood. She can feel the wound in her back, such a small thing. The Fade spins around her, refusing to dissipate, instead melting together into eerily familiar shapes. Stone floors. Books. A corner. She steps toward them. Her body is so heavy. Much too heavy to carry any longer.

There’s a voice. It ripples through the fabric of the Fade like water.

 _“So smart._ _You’re so good at magic.”_

She starts to crawl.

_“Wish I were like you.”_

She can’t heal. Never had the knack, and has no mana anyway. It's over. But before the end, at least…

_“…because you’re amazing.”_

“Shut up,” she croaks, iron and salt on her lips.

_“…my friend.”_

“Shut _up!”_

She crawls to a corner, her back against a wall, and curls there. Her last shuddering breath hisses out her lungs.

In the end, there isn’t enough time for regrets, but enough to realize she has never even said _I’m sorry._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> amell's first name is Lorna. she looks like [this](http://imgur.com/a/YBQFg)


	2. Chapter 2

# II.

 

**GROWTH, A SERIES OF CATASTROPHES**

 

Aeducan has never seen the sun, and yet its unrelenting heat seems nauseatingly familiar. Like a forgotten childhood memory, or a nightmare half-remembered.

They had known what the surface looked like; they had seen illustrations. But surely this goes beyond imagination. They take roads that they were sure they had passed before, see faces that seem unsettlingly familiar. There is something gratingly familiar about Alistair’s crooked grin, about Morrigan’s sneer, about the precise color of Leliana’s hair...

Even the most innocuous things resemble twisted omens, murky and unreadable.

This had never happened before. All their life, they had lived in darkness and in comfort, and felt none of this. Their life had been good. They had been a good dwarf. None of this should have been happening to them. Not the betrayal, not the exile, and not this wretched disease of the mind that seems to have overtaken them.

It be surface-sickness. But none of the other surfacers they encounter seem to have any idea what they’re talking about. Aeducan stops mentioning it.

Ceasing to mention it does not cease to give them attacks of vertigo and weakness at every particularly familiar-unfamiliar sight. Sometimes, it seems to go away. But other times….

In the cellar of Redcliffe castle, the _wrongness_ rushes over them like a wave. They stop, supporting themselves against the stone wall.

“I’m _fine,”_ Aeducan hisses, when the elven assassin at their side reacts with concern. Belatedly, they realize how hostile that must have sounded, and bite their tongue. “I mean--just give me a moment.”

There’s something like a memory bubbling up in their mind, some blurry face and a vague voice, all accompanied by a guilty twist in the gut. Before they have time to dwell on it, though, a walking corpse lunges at them.

Aeducan cuts through them, approaches the occupied cell. A figure shuffles inside. Aeducan peers in.

It takes a moment. And then it hits Aeducan like an anvil dropped by the Maker himself.

“Jowan!”

\--

 

The twisted omens gain a sudden meaning. Amell— _Aeducan—_ had been brought back as part of that purpose. To defeat the archdemon, as they had failed before, and—to fix what they had done wrong.

Stone knows—Maker knows, they had done so much wrong.

There must be some implications here. Some proof of something essential, something about the Maker, or the Fade, but--

“I’m going to get the arl to release you,” they tell him.

He blinks, not looking nearly as relieved or as grateful as he should have. “Why?”

Aeducan huffs. “Because you’re my—I mean…”

He looks up. They look down.

“Not important.” They wave their hand. “I’ll explain more when you’re out of the cell and all. Got it?”

They do it all _right_ this time. Connor lives. Isolde lives. The arl awakes to full health and a family intact. He owes them now.

“Very well. I will show mercy,” the Arl sighs, relenting. Aeducan’s shoulders slump in relief, and the arl continues: “He shall be granted the mercy of a clean execution.”

It takes a moment for the words to sink in, and for Aeducan’s stomach to drop.

\--

Jowan doesn't even _defend himself,_ that spineless—!

Aeducan goes from pleading to half-shouting while Jowan just stands there, head lowered. He looks up only for a moment, to catch Aeducan’s eyes, and smiles.

The anger evaporates, leaving a hollow.

The body, when Aeducan is unfortunate enough to pass it by a day later, is sickly pale, drained of blood. The head, a mess of blood smears and tangled hair, had rolled not far away.

Aeducan doesn’t look closer.

\--

The Deep Roads grow darker, and the hordes of darkspawn thicker. Aeducan’s arms ache from cutting through them. Their knees grow weak, their blows softer, their dodging too slow…

Aeducan has thought barely at all since Redcliffe, and now they are paying for it.

The rest have fallen somewhere behind them, but they were not raised to fight the spawn. But Aeducan is a dwarf—yes, they are a dwarf now, not a mage. They ought to have done well to remember that. They ought to have…they should have…

Aeducan falls.

Animals hunt and kill, and eat the flesh of their dead prey, but Aeducan is not dead yet. The darkspawn eat, and yet when they leave with a chorus of unholy shrieks, distracted by another group of attackers, Aeducan is still there, not whole enough to move, hardly whole enough to scream.

Last time, there had been no time to think before the soft blackness, but now there is all too much of it.  Time to think of the people they’d seen fall. Time to curse themselves for believing there was some _meaning_ to all this. Time for self-loathing. Time for regret.

And time to remember a child in a tower whose world was small enough to make her seem large—who had had some foolish boy follow her around and tell her, _I bet you can do anything._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Aeducan's first name is Megrun. They look like [this](http://imgur.com/a/uvDuZ)


	3. Chapter 3

# III.

**THE TRUTH WAS ALWAYS ENTROPY**

 

Mahariel grows up sickened by the taste and texture of meat, nearly vomiting whenever coaxed into trying it. He grows up too flighty to learn the hunt easily, eyes darting too fast, confused and nervous at the open space around him.

He cannot explain. He doesn’t have to, Tamlen says, smiling warmly each time he must repeat it. Everyone has oddities and Mahariel is no lesser for his own. It doesn’t make him weak. Mahariel lets Tamlen’s good nature reassure him.

There are whispers. Shadows of sensations like teeth grazing his flesh, ready to tear meat from his bones. Images of severed heads and mutilated corpses racing in the dark when he shuts his eyes at night. He ignores them.

It is the first sight of the bearded shemlen that brings it all roaring back, like the sudden rememory of a childhood nightmare.

This time, when his world crumbles and Duncan leads him away to a life of war and blood, he is not surprised, and barely heartbroken. He only hopes Tamlen’s chances are better than his.

At least now the dark shadows of his life make sense.

\--

He mutters the shemlen king’s words under his breath before he can even say them. He ignores Duncan’s strange look, knowing the man has days to live--and feels a pang, thinking of Alistair.

It’s good to see him again, alive and uneaten by darkspawn. He can’t help but give the other man a tight hug--a Dalish greeting, he explains, letting go a moment sooner than he would have liked.

Later, when it’s all gone wrong (again), he sits by Alistair in the muck. It occurs to him suddenly that he ought to have tried to stop the massacre. He’d known it was coming. Why hadn’t he acted? He could have stopped it. He could have...

Mahariel closes his eyes, and lets his head fall back a moment. He feels teeth sinking into the flesh on his body, sees a bleeding severed head.

“This has all happened before, you know,” he says, dully.

“What?” Alistair’s red-rimmed eyes and tone of disbelief cut in equal measure.

\--

Mahariel finds his hand creeping up the back of his shirt too often, searching for a stab wound that does not exist and that he yet feels. He chafes his arms constantly, trying to smooth away the feeling of their teeth on his skin. It is nothing but a memory, a ghost.

But that is easy enough to ignore, compared to the haunting echoes of events he’s seen twice before. The words he hears are too familiar, the scenarios frighteningly unchanged no matter _what_ he says or does differently. He wonders if he can change _nothing._ If this is the Creators’ punishment for him, to fail over and over, to die a million times and recall each failure, unable to affect or avoid his fate.

Perhaps, if only someone would believe him…

Alistair doesn’t. Morrigan doesn’t. Sten certainly doesn’t. Desperate, he rattles off details he’s learned in previous lives, and they just _stare_. Pitying. Amused. Disdainful. He knows nothing solid enough to convince them. Why hadn’t his blasted idiot past selves _listened?_

Mahariel is left half-convinced that he really is mad. That all his living and reliving is nothing but a trick of the Fade, a fevered Blight-dream...

Leliana believes, but only because she would believe anything. It doesn’t make him feel less crazy. Suppose he was only imagining it, constructing the memories? But no...if that were the case, then how could he know so much about everything that is to come? How can he keep being right?

No, surely this is real. Surely he can change _something._

He avoids Redcliffe like the plague. No, he will not venture there until he thinks of something foolproof this time. He can’t rely on the arl.

Revisiting familiar places gives him a headache, like seeing double or even triple--but it is just those places that he knows he can survive. Kinloch Hold, through which he knows his way unerringly, did not best him last time, nor this time. This time, neither does Orzammar, every stone of it familiar--the rock above, comforting. The forest, he avoids. He has met his end at his birthplace twice now. He won’t risk that yet.

The shadowy sensations claw at him more deeply. His skin crawls at every noise; he grips his bow too tightly, stares into space for long hours, then jerks and nearly elbows Alistair and Leliana when they try to put reassuring hands on him.

Redcliffe calls, but Mahariel dallies. He thinks of plan after plan. He loses sleep--though not to darkspawn. The blight-drenched dreams are nearly dreary now.

He sits by the fire, listening to his companions bicker. When he notes that Morrigan is looking upon him with a kind of hunger, Mahariel suddenly remembers that in three whole lifetimes, he has never once been kissed.

Morrigan doesn’t love him, and, he is comforted to know, will not. He can simply, for the first time in three lives, enjoy something.

“This part didn’t happen, before,” he mumbles to her, in her tent. She snorts and rolls over. She has no patience for his nonsense.

Mahariel has never had so many friends, and has never felt so yawningly alone.

\--

One night he wakes to a nightmare wearing yet another familiar face, flesh rotting off the bones.

Tamlen has always loved him. Mahariel wipes the black blood from his blade, and stumbles away into the woods to heave and sob until he feels empty again. Morrigan does not follow, which is for the best.

How many childhood friends will he murder over the course of his lives, he wonders?

\--

In the end, all his plans dissipate, and he simply unlocks the cell door, steps aside, and gestures politely.

“Please,” he says to his oldest friend, “run for your life.”

“W-what?” Jowan doesn’t understand, of course he doesn’t. “You’re letting me go?”

Mahariel smiles brightly. “That’s right. Get going. Oh, takes these poultices. You might need them.”

“Why?”

Mahariel fixes him with his sharp elven eyes. “Two lifetimes ago, we grew up in Kinloch together. If you stay here, you’ll die. You don’t need to believe me. You just need to go. So please. Go.”

He can feel his companions rolling their eyes at his mad rambling. His heart begins to sink. _Please, believe me. Or don’t. But_ go.

Jowan goes. Mahariel sags with relief, ignoring the protests and grumbles from his companions. He’ll make it up to them later. He hefts his bow and ascends, once more.

\--

“You—you were supposed to leave!”

He grips Jowan by the shoulders, digging his fingers into him until he can feel Jowan wince. Why in all the Void had Jowan felt the need to come _back?_ That cowardly—that guilt-ridden—

...that self-sacrificing, altruistic, absolute bleeding _idiot—_

Jowan is looking down at him. Confused. Afraid. Mahariel feels his grip weaken, and then Alistair gently pulls him away.

Maybe he really can’t change anything, he thinks feverishly, stumbling around Redcliffe Palace like a drunken man. His vision is spotting, his head is spinning. He can’t keep doing this. He can’t see that corpse again _._ He has to do something. Something drastic.

He finds himself outside the unconscious Arl’s room. It’s empty. It is only Mahariel, and the Arl, the _fucking_ Arl, that pitiless bastard Arl, and now it is Mahariel and the Arl and Mahariel’s good sharp knife, so good for skinning prey and cutting meat, so good good good for _expediency—_

Let the bloody fucking Arl show his ‘ _mercy’_ now.

\--

“...hereby accuse you of the murder of Arl Eamon, and sentence you to death.” The lady of Redcliffe’s accented words are clipped and trembling. “Have you anything to say for yourself, blood mage?”

Jowan shakes his head, allows himself to be roughly handled away.

Mahariel watches, feeling a scream building somewhere deep and dark within him, and does not say a word.

Morrigan is firing off some flippant comment _._ Alistair’s eyes are red-rimmed and puffy. Mahariel can barely hear them snipe at each other.

He slips away from the palace. Outside, the sun is punishingly bright. He feels the old wounds clawing at him again, illusions of his unhappened past, and then, dizzying blankness.

He’s at the lake, without really remembering coming there. Behind his head, some kind of static clears, leaving him with his thoughts. He draws a ragged breath, expecting a sob, but hearing only a kind of raspy, unsteady laughter.

There really is no point to this all. He knows that now.

The water laps at his bare feet. He had never gotten used to shoes, this time around.

So! That’s that. It is impossible to change anything. Fate would find its skulking way around anything he cared to try.

The water rose to his hips.

Well, he would not have it. Fate would not strangle him, nor play him upon its strings. He would not be a puppet, not the Creators’, not the Maker’s, not anything’s.

The water closes over his head, and for a moment, he struggles to breathe, until the strong undercurrent of the deceptively placid lake pulls him further under. His lungs burn as the sunlight above fade away, and he is thankful that he is not loved.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Mahariel's first name is Ithiren. He looks like [this]()


	4. Chapter 4

# IV.

**AND THE VOID MADE TENDER**

 

Cousland wakes nearly every night, screaming. And every time, his mother or father or brother or servant rush to his side, shushing him gently until he falls back asleep.

“It’s not real,” they always say, stroking his hair. “It’s only a dream. In the morning, you will forget.”

He never forgets. The dread in him is as constant as the pulsing of blood in his veins, a continuous murmur _something is coming_ scratching the back of his skull. He is too afraid to let himself think on what it is.

By the time he is ten, the memories are too clear, memories no child should have.

He speaks of them to no one. He remembers how _that_ went, the last time.

His life is good. His parents love him. He looks up to his brother. There is always enough to eat.

When his brother departs for Ostagar, and Cousland does not, he nearly sobs with relief. Free, he's free, he thinks wildly. Maybe this time, he will be spared.

But still, the Blight comes for him.

Cousland is so tired.

\--

He doesn’t bother to stop the massacre. He knows he won’t be able to, even if his own brother’s life is on the line. Yet another death on his hands. The blow is more of a dull thud.

He quickly develops a reputation as an excessively emotional man, perhaps even a bit soft in the head. He greets Wynne, a woman he has only just now met, like a long-lost mother. He wraps Alistair in a tight hug, and doesn’t let go even when the other man starts to chuckle nervously. Every soldier he sees, he treats with such painstaking kindness; they begin to wonder if he knows something that they don’t.

He doesn’t want to go, but the Blight drags him along, miserable and resigned. He will be the leader of this little party, once again.

He heads to the forest, because it is a long journey, and he misses his previous home, which he never got to return to. He tarries. He helps who he can. He whiles the hours away on idle chatter. He doesn’t want to see how the Blight will kill him this time.

\--

Outside of Jowan’s cell, Cousland has to take a moment and center himself. He feels the panic coming upon him, just like it had when he first entered the Redcliffe dungeon this lifetime.

Now, though, he has a plan. He steels himself.

“Hey,” he says.

Jowan looks up at him from where he’s sitting on the floor of his cell, dull fear behind his eyes. “Are you here to…?”

Cousland just opens the door. Suddenly, the fear is gone, replaced by miserable acceptance.

“You’re going to execute me, like the Arl ordered,” he says.

“No,” Cousland replies quickly. “No. I just—here. Get up, first.”

He offers a hand. Jowan hesitates, but takes it. His grip is weak. Cold. Cousland pulls him up.

“So uh, Jowan. You know the Right of Conscription…?”

\--

Alistair grumbles about having a maleficar join them, but not much. They already have murderers and assassins in their company--what’s a measly blood mage to that?

Cousland, as ever, tarries. They can’t put Jowan through the Joining yet. Not when he’s so weak and tired--not when he’d been _tortured_ and not given any chance to fully recover. Alistair relents.

In the meantime, Cousland has time to talk to…

It’s been years. Lifetimes, really. But he sits next to Jowan and even manages to look him in the face.

“So, uh, are you okay then?”

Jowan looks down, and mumbles an affirmative. Cousland smiles, suddenly feeling his eyes burn.

“That’s great,” he says, throat constricting. “I—I’m glad.”

A sudden image of a blood-drained, severed head flashes through his memories. He wrings his hands.

“Why are you doing this?” Jowan asks.

Cousland had never been good with words the way a noble should have. Not much good at words, not much good at swordplay, not much good at anything. “Well—we need Wardens. I mean—we were all wiped out as Ostagar, you know? We really need recruits and you’re a—” The words elude him, as they always have. “You’re a good person.”

Jowan’s face crumples.

“You are,” Cousland says. It feels as though the words are long overdue. “You’re good and—you’re a strong mage, and you’re clever.”

_You’re so smart. So good at magic._

“Thank you,” Jowan replies meekly.

Cousland suddenly aches to hear him rattle off. He wants Jowan to talk about Lily or whine or complain about their teachers. But Jowan remains quiet, cringing like an abused dog ready for its newest master to turn on it at any moment.

Cousland doesn’t have the words to fix it. He just puts a hand on Jowan’s shoulder for a moment, lingers, and then leaves.

\--

He should have known that Jowan wouldn’t have survived the Joining.

Was he truly expecting anything different?

He wasn’t, he wasn’t, but his eyes won’t stop streaming and blurring the whole road out of Redcliffe.

\--

Crying. There is so much _crying_ this time. His heart hurts to see Kinloch, to see Orzammar, to long-dead friends and family alive again, no spark of recognition in their eyes at the sight of him. Gorim in the Denerim market, advertising his wares—tight throat, burning eyes. A chance attack by a group of shrieks in the night—a whole hour spent sobbing by the river.

What must his companions think of him, their fearless leader?

Alistair still wakes him gently from the nightmares. Leliana sings to him. Zevran...offers a kind of comfort of his own. Wynne knows healing spells that soothe the mind as well as the body. Even Morrigan emerges from her own remote tent to shove health and stamina potions into his arms. Oghren stomps out, offers him a drink, and doesn’t require him to talk about it. Sten, unbelievably, still follows him, even after their fight, even after all of Cousland’s timewasting.

With nowhere to go but onward, Cousland starts to wonder if he might be able to make it.

 

\--

It’s impossible to know how much time he spends on the rack. He starts begging immediately, for mercy, for just a moment’s pause, for death. The only answer is another question, another turn.

Cutting. Burning. Painful lashes biting into bare skin. And then, what must be hours later, the floor of a cell, grime smearing into his blood-crusted eye. When he tries, he can’t move his limbs. He can hear the rushing of his blood pounding in his ears, drowning everything out. When he moves his eyes, blearily, he notices the blood pooling around him on the floor.

_Stay awake! If you’re fatally wounded, fight it long enough for me to come and heal you!_

It’s Wynne’s voice. A memory. Will to live, she’d said. It could make all the difference.

But that memory floats dazedly away. It’s good to close his eyes. It’s good to feel the pain float away. It’s good to feel himself disappear slowly, so slowly.

With any luck, he won’t wake up again this time.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Cousland's first name is Alexander. He looks like [this](http://imgur.com/a/gVSBt).


	5. Chapter 5

# V.

**A FIST AGAINST ETERNITY**

 

Tabris does not scream when she wakes from her childhood nightmares. Tabris keeps her mouth shut and her shivering under control. She doesn’t want to wake her cousins, asleep in their shared bed.

Tabris has, from her first conscious moments, been filled with resolve.

She is eight, watching her father shoved into the mud by a shemlen, when she realizes why she failed the last time. She had been weak. She had grown in the comfort of a palace, surrounded by servants. After nearly two decades of that, of course she had grown soft. Weak. Pathetic. Now, holding herself back from tearing out the shemlen’s eyes, Tabris knows she has never been this strong.

She will be ready this time.

Her mother teaches her swordplay. Her father teaches her the way of clever words. Both these things Tabris hones. Any waking moment she can spare, she pours herself into learning the skills she might need later in life, when she must face the Blight. She learns traps and lockpicks, poisons and poultices, all sorts of things it is illegal for her to know. The rest of the alienage thinks her a strange child—so focused, so angry, so filled with fire—but Tabris pays that little mind. They are her family, and she will kill and steal to protect them, but she will not be judged.

On the day of her wedding, when she sees that bearded doom-wrought face, Tabris knows it is time. She is ready. She prepares herself for whatever losses she must face, and fights and screams and bleeds until she is through.

There are rules to this game, she thinks grimly, with her back to her latest home. There are rules, and she must adhere to them if she is to succeed. She must do as fate decrees. She must be strong. She must not give up.

She will do it _right_ this time.

\--

Tabris is everything a Grey Warden should be.

She is strong. She is clever. She is agile. She is all these things, and she is _determined._ Her companions joke about her perpetual scowl.

Tabris doesn't care what they think. She is here to do a job, and she is damn well going to succeed.

Still, though Tabris can win any fight she starts, she avoids starting fights. No need to tempt fate. As much as her blood boils, any conflict is a chance for her to die before she can succeed. She can't allow that to happen.

It won't, of course. She is a phenomenal warrior. She can take slews of opponents at once. She can slay ogres single-handed. She can do all this and not even blink, though afterwards she is drenched in sweat and concealing just how hard she is breathing.

But her most potent weapon is her silver tongue. It’s beautiful how things fall into place now that she can muster the right words. Things, people, events. Strangers tell her anything she wishes to know with nothing but a smile as payment. Bandits put down their swords at a few firm words. At Redcliffe, the townspeople rally around her with a confidence she has never seen before. They believe in her, all because of her words.

Rules, she reminds herself. And she’s learning them this time.

Before she goes into Redcliffe Castle, she pauses and takes a deep breath. Rules. Remember the rules.

\--

She doesn’t smile at Jowan this time. She shuts her mouth, listens, and doesn’t promise anything. She needs to figure this out. Her mind runs circles through her memories, tracking the path of causality. If she conscripts him, he dies. If she lets him go, he comes back and dies.

So this time, _this time,_ she’ll make Eamon spare him. With her silver tongue, she will persuade him.

She _has_ to.

As Aeducan, she has tried this before, but she was foolish and leaden-tongued then, and painfully naive. It would not be enough to stack the odds in Jowan’s favor. There were no odds, when it came to fate. There was only doing it wrong, and doing it _right._

What, she wonders, would be the _right_ way to clear a condemned man’s name?

“Jowan,” she says clearly, when the time comes. “I will send Jowan into the Fade.”

The commotion that erupts is deadly satisfying.

\--

She watches him go into the Fade, with all the time and equipment she can spare for him. There is doubt. Moments of old, creeping distrust.

_He’s a weak fool anyway. And a weak mage. If he doesn’t die he’ll come back as an abomination and try to run off like the coward he is._

It is an old inner voice that thinks those things. A person she hasn't been in a long time is thinking those things. Tabris banishes her. She is no more. _She_ was the weak one.

Her trust proves well-founded. Jowan comes out alive. Alive, and definitely not an abomination.

“You just had your Harrowing,” she remarks before she can stop herself, feeling absurd pride bloom in her chest. _Like you wanted_ , she doesn’t add.

Jowan gives her an odd look, brow furrowing. “Well I—I don’t know if a Harrowing is anything like…”

Her blood runs cold. That was foolish. "Of course I wouldn't know," she says quickly, and looks away.

\--

Tabris speaks to the Arl like she fights her battles--she throws everything she has at him, an unending barrage of blows.

“When I let him go, he came back,” she tells him. “He has stated that he wants to atone, and has demonstrated it with his actions. He even risked his life and his soul to go into the Fade and save Connor.”

The arl raises his brow. “Am I supposed to forgive an assassin? The man who allowed my son to become possessed?”

“With all due respect," she says evenly, knowing how much these shemlen liked to be flattered by knife-ears like her. "There was no lasting harm. You and your family are alive, and your son is no longer possessed. To execute him now would be lowly vengeance, not justice. Unworthy of a nobleman.”

The Arl shakes his head, unmoved. “I cannot allow a maleficar to go free.”

Her teeth clench. She forces her jaw to loosen and takes a deep breath. “You owe me your life,” she says, and now her voice is strong and silvery, impossible to ignore. “You owe me your son’s life, and your wife’s life, and the lives of all the people down at Redcliffe village. I am asking for a boon, for one person’s life. I have need of him. Will you not grant it?”

She keeps her tone neutral, but she sees his face harden. 

The battle is lost. He will not grant her desire. All her tactics, all clever words, all her plans--they meant nothing.

The rules, it seems, have decreed this.

Some fates are sealed.

Tabris turns bitterly away, swallowing her scream of frustration.

\--

“I need a moment,” is all she mumbles at Alistair and Leliana before she wanders off.

She feels the weight of yet another failure on her back. For a moment, her strength dissipates, like every muscle and bone in her body have been crushed. What good is she? What good has she ever been? Can she not do this one simple thing, save the life of this _one_ man, who she has now failed to save six times in a row?

She is nearly ready to cut her own heart out in rage. She even rests her hand on the hilt of her dagger, twitchin.g

But then, it is over.Tabris is not Mahariel. She is not weak.

She rises. She returns.

Perhaps it is not the life of one man she is meant to save. Perhaps it is the lives of millions.

There is still a Blight to stop.

\--

Tabris is not Cousland. She is not weak. What could not be changed, could be endured.

She gnashes her teeth through the torture. _Live! Live!_ Her head rings, every moment. _Do better this time, for them! For the ones you’ve already failed._

And live she does. Her limbs are disjointed again and there’s blood pooling around her small body, but her rescuers are here. Leliana is there, weeping, cradling her with gentle hands while Wynne’s magic burns through her broken body, melding her back together like broken steel.

She will not die upon Fort Drakon, not yet.

From there on out, she is flying blind. She will not have her memories to guide her on the right path. She will have to forge her own path, choose the right thing with no foreknowledge.

She has learned the rules, Tabris thinks, recovering at the Arl's estate, Leliana curled around her. She knows the rules. She can do this.

She will.

\--

Fort Drakon had never been distant, in this life. It had loomed on the edge of the city horizon, just visible over the alienage walls. Reminding her of what was to come. Reminding her of her past weakness.

Fitting, that this will be the place she dies.

She’s numb. She breathes, but she doesn’t feel any air enter her lungs. There is heat and blood and pain but all she feels is weight, weight, weight.

Alistair is gone. Tabris could not find the right words to get him to stay, to get him to understand that they _had_ to spare Loghain, for sake of everything they had worked for. Did he not realize that there were _rules?_ That things had to be done in certain ways? That falling prey to petty lust for revenge would spell certain doom? But Alistair does not know about the rules, and he is not there with her at the end. Perhaps he was never meant to be.

Morrigan is gone, because Tabris had refused her ritual, had refused to be weak. And what would it be, if not weakness, to take this easy way out? Fate would not let Tabris survive that. Surely, surely, this was the right choice. It still hurts to see Morrigan go, nearly as much as it hurts to think her presence had never been anything but an elaborate plot.

(Tabris thinks of lifetimes ago, of lying with Morrigan’s bare skin against hers, feeling the rumble of Morrigan’s chest as she laughs—she had not thought herself loved, but still feels something within her shatter.)

And Riordan, too, is gone. Dead.

Leliana stands behind her, but the thought of what Tabris must do to her brings only pain.

Tabris is out of options. She must stand before the beast alone.

She is numb. Weak. But she has a chance now to end it all, so she grabs her sword, and runs.

If any of her deaths can be permanent, it will be this one.

Her sword plunges into the creature’s skull, and there is a flash.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Tabris's first name is Rivkah. She looks like [this](http://imgur.com/a/BqOgB).


	6. Chapter 6

# VI.

**NEVER HAD LIFE SEEMED SO SWEET AND EMPTY**

 

Brosca is born within the earth, close to the stone. From her first steps in Dust Town, she is centered. Grounded. As unwavering as the Stone itself.

She grows. The skills from her past life come back to her slowly, but easily. This time, she does not feel she needs to claw for them, as Tabris had. She takes her time, goes through every motion, and yet feels as though there is always so much time left to spare. Time left to think.

Sometimes, she wonders if she’d failed. If she had succeeded, after all, why is she back again?

But when it is time to sleep, Rica sings these thoughts away in their shared pallet on the floor, stroking Brosca’s hair. Brosca closes her eyes each night, resolved to enjoy moments such as these, to savor the simple pleasures she always seemed to miss.

In the end, when inevitable disaster strikes, her biggest surprise is that Rica survives.

\--

She expects to hate Alistair and Morrigan, when she sees them again. Hate them for abandoning her. Hate them for their vile last words to her. Hate them for abandoning her. 

When she does see them again, she realizes that there’s nothing she wants more in the world. She listens to conversations she has heard half a dozen times before, and finds herself smiling. She knows just what to say to make their faces light up, just which little gift will mean the most to them. No, she isn't tired of that yet, perhaps never will be.

She thinks back, and realizes this was not always true of her.

She can no longer imagine being that person.

There is so much to every predictable word, so much underneath every phrase that Leliana or Zevran or Alistair or Morrigan or any of the others speak. There is a richness to everyone, a depth that she could get lost in.

She only wishes she had seen it earlier.

\--

When she looks upon Jowan’s face, there is something, for a moment. Dread, she supposes. A resignation that doesn’t sit well with her.

_I can’t save him._

But she opens the cell door, smiles at him.

“Don’t come back, please,” she says. “The Arl will surely kill you, if you do.”

He doesn’t react, except to mumble a meek thank you as he walks past her. She sighs.

“Just don’t say I didn’t warn you," she calls.

He comes back. He aids them. He is imprisoned, again. He’s granted the mercy of execution, again.

_I can’t save him._

Some fates are sealed. Brosca has accepted it. She turns her heart towards other things. The world is large. There are many things to regret, many more people she has failed, many greater things that she cannot change.

Sometimes, it is best to let things go. Brosca lets go.

\--

Brosca loves her companions, her dear friends who have been with her through so much. She likes to think they love her, too. Alistair whispers as much, at first boyishly nervous, then less so. She feels like something of a cradle-robber. They are both twenty, but Brosca has reached that age many, many times now.

She loves them. She fears her heart might break for the loving of them--but there has grown a wall between Brosca and the others.

She is simply too good.

Brosca always knows what to do. What to say. Where to go. She is unerring, flawless. It unsettles them. Their leader is too perfect, too eerie.

Leliana’s songs are not the songs of comfort she once sang. Morrigan’s snipes are too cautious, too guarded. Zevran has never known her for a lover. Even Alistair grows distant from her, love her though he may.  There is a distance in how they regard her, a level of respect that leaves her cold.

But this ache she can endure. She has survived worse. Her place is here, with them. There is still so much to savor.

She moves on.

\--

She knows now, what her choice at the Landsmeet will mean. The hatred in his eyes, the pain, the turning of his back to her. Brosca accepts it. She loses him, again—save this time, a ghostly crown upon his head, he remains in her company just long enough to proclaim exactly what he thinks of her.

She makes another change. She accepts the Ritual. She could not escape the cycle even through the annihilation of her soul—so perhaps, she had been wrong about that rule. Perhaps the Ritual is necessary.

(And if she simply does not wish to see Morrigan depart just yet...well, what of it?)

The battle is frighteningly easy. She has defeated the archdemon before—why should she not do it again? An unseen blow from the side tears open her gut, but she ignores it. It cannot stop her. Nothing can keep her from finishing it. Energy courses through her as she stabs it, light flashing blindingly bright.

The beast is dead, and Brosca is alive. It is done. She throws her sword to the ground, swaying.

The wound in her gut--well, she can survive that. She has survived worse. As soon as they reach Wynne, she would be good as new again.

The walk down the tower is long. Her companions walk ahead of her, their voices bright and hopeful. She smiles weakly to watch them, going ahead of her for once, rather than behind. She's proud. So proud.

She sways again, and suddenly feels the need to sit down. They don’t hear her, lost in their conversation. Oghren is making some bawdy joke. Sten is telling him to shut up, before he gets kicked down the stairs. Leliana is calling him a softie, her laughter like music. Even Morrigan is laughing along with her, Morrigan who had never before known friendship.

Brosca watches them disappear. In a minute, perhaps, they will notice that their indomitable commander is not behind them. But not yet.

She lies back against the stairs, and feels her heart slowly beat away her lifeblood. The wound had been worse than she’d thought, she realizes. She is dying.

She needs only to cry out to them. They would rush back to her, with poultices and creation magic, and Brosca would live.

But for what?

The Blight is stopped. The battle over. Brosca’s bloodied blade lies discarded somewhere in the tower above. She has won.

She listens to their conversation die away as they grow ever more distant from her. They don’t need her, she realizes. She has done all she could for them, changed them nearly as much as they’ve changed her, but now she is of no more use to them. She is old, and burdened, and weary.

Brosca’s eyes slide closed. She breathes quietly for a while, then slower, and slower. She lets go.

She rests.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Brosca's first name is Olga. She looks like [this](http://imgur.com/a/Eomeg).


	7. Chapter 7

# VII.

**MY WHOLE AND HUNGRY HEART**

 

Surana is small and thin, and often left to his own devices. His mother scarcely has the time to look at him, always doing other people’s wash for a handful of coppers, if not passed out from exhaustion. He cares for himself from a young age, fixing his own meals, putting himself to bed. It’s not as though he’s really a child anymore. There are long hours between the times he gets to exchange more than a few words with anyone else, sometimes even long days. His thoughts swell to fill the silence.

He doesn’t know why he’s here.

It is a strange and solemn epilogue to a life’s purpose already fulfilled.

He wanders. One day, in winter, he curls up under an icy tree, closes his eyes and breathes, half-dreaming of the hearth at home and a warm summer day. A human shriek wakes him.

It takes him a moment to gather himself, to see--the snow and ice around him all melted, sizzling, and the distinct glow of magic.

He spends three days locked in a barn before the Templars come for him.

\--

On the journey, he falls sick and goes through most of it barely conscious, only vaguely aware of the jolting of the wagon they’re taking him in. When he stirs, he sees Kinloch Hold looming in the distance.

Once they’ve taken his blood, he wanders in a haze to where he remembers his bed being--only to be yanked away, shouted at. His head hurts. Someone is shoving some broth at him, demanding he swallow. Things began to filter in--sharp edges of the tower’s masonry, the faces that hover above him, and the sounds of children crying echoing down the corridor.

“Hey.” It’s small, hushed, but Surana picks it up.

Suddenly, there is a soft hand on his shoulder, and then a boy is in his face. Human. Dark-haired. Scraggly.

“Are you alright?” the boy asks. “You’ve been out all day…”

Surana doesn’t answer, but just stares. And then everything sharpens. It hits him like a pike in the chest: where he is, when he was here last--when he _grew up here_ last--

And who he’s _talking to…_

Surana lurches away.

“Hey, hey wait—”

But Surana does listen, letting the voice calling to him be drowned out by the rushing of blood in his ears.

\--

It’s just been so _long_ since he’s seen Jowan as—as a—

As anything but that thin, hopeless prisoner rotting in Redcliffe dungeon, waiting to be beheaded.

\--

When Surana next wakes, he has his bearings. He has food in his stomach, acrid red health potion still stuck at the back of his throat. He stands solidly and feels the coldness of the marble against his bare feet.

It’s all real, he thinks. It has all the cruel edges of reality, and they cut sharper than he remembers. The Templar’s voices are harsher, their glances crueler, their eyes more everpresent. There are so few windows. Not enough light, not enough cool air, nowhere to run, but a few places to hide--and the air absolutely stinks with fear.

It makes him feel like he is a child again, the way he hasn’t in lifetimes. It makes him feel _weak._

He keeps his mouth shut, keeps his eyes down. He walks quietly, so as not to make a sound. He listens, and obeys--and waits.

It’s all too easy to avoid ever talking to Jowan. He watches from a distance, sometimes. Thinks of what is to come.

_This is for the best._

_\--_

One day, he walks by a shadow—a girl. She passes him in the hall, dark eyes and dark tangled hair, eyes red and face pulled into a scowl. Surana freezes, and feels his world flip as he watches her walk by without a second glance.

A moment later, he hears her voice echoing down the hall: “Actually, my name is _Amell.”_

And he knows why he—why she--says it. It was because the Templar had called—is calling him, no, her, a filthy brat, and he—

His head splits.

\--

There are a few weeks like this—echoes of things he has said reaching his ears, glimpses of old memories playing out in the corner of his eye.

There is an Amell at the tower. The Amell he was—that a part of him still _is_ —reenacting all his ancient childhood’s mistakes, like a cruel shadowplay on the cold stone walls. Like an echo, an echo that has never stopped.

He had always assumed that he had always been Amell. Reincarnated. Brought back as someone else. But if Amell existed, at the same time as Surana, did that mean--that Tabris and Brosca and Mahariel and everyone he had ever been--were they living out the childhoods he remembered, free of his memories? Even now?

Had there been a Surana here, when he had been Amell?

When he had been Amell, he would never have paid attention to a quiet little elven boy.

Maker, Stone, Creators—what _is_ he?

Perhaps it is impossible to know. He can only watch his old self scowl and withdraw further and further from the world, and scrabble at the purchases of sanity as Amell echoes, echoes, echoes.

\--

Jowan is about to approach Amell in the corner. Surana watches.

Jowan is hesitant. He shuffles a bit outside the library. He’s already over-worrying over this one thing--making a single friend.

It’s when he’s about to enter that a flood of memories comes back to Surana: the snide comments, the insults, the sneers. Every moment he had watched Jowan’s face crumple, or seen tears at the corner of his eyes, and ignored them, because what had he cared about this dumpy loser, seven lifetimes ago?

Surana stops Jowan with a tug on his sleeve. Jowan jumps.

“Oh!” he yelps. “I didn’t see you there.”

Surana hasn’t said many words since he’d been taken here, again. He can’t remember if he’s spoken at all. But he’s spent two lifetimes perfecting the art of _knowing the right words._ He can do this.

“Can you walk with me?”

Jowan looks confused, but pleased. “Sure.”

They walk. Surana feels relief as they put distance between them and Amell, and then a bit of awkwardness. Suddenly, the right words aren’t as easily grasped as they’d always been before. “Hello,” he tries.

Jowan’s face scrunches “Hello to you too.” He rubs the back of his head. “You can talk?”

“Of course I can talk.”

“Well...what did you want to talk about?”

Surana blinks, feeling like a prey species. “Can you help me read a book?”

They end up lying on their stomachs in the library, peering over the corners of a book. Surana knows how to read, but he simply points to the passages he wants to hear, and listens. Jowan struggles. He stutters over the longer words, and his sentences come out choppy and uneven.

Inside his thin chest, Surana feels something tighten.

They aren’t friends, not really. He just wants Jowan away from Amell. If that means hanging around him, having awkward half-conversations that Surana refuses to contribute much to, then so be it. He tries, a few times, to make it not like that, but every time, he can see the end loom in his mind’s eye—the Redcliffe dungeons, the bleeding, severed head…

He doesn’t know how to look Jowan in the eye, thinking of that.

But again and again, they’re on the floor of the library, bodies brushing gently against each other. Surana listens, but doesn’t bother to pick up the words. He just lets Jowan’s voice wash over him, and his mind wanders.

“Are you listening?” Jowan asks.

“Um,” Surana gulps. “No I—could you read that part again?”

Like this, he supposes, he can cling.

\--

One day, Amell storms past him, eyes watering, face red with fury. He watches a moment, swayed by the memory--

_I don’t want to be followed. I don’t want to be watched. I’ll make you all sorry for this!_

—and when the door slams, he can barely tell if he did it himself, or if he just hears it echo down the hall after Amell does.

Jowan is the one that smells smoke later, that goes dashing down the halls worried. Surana only follows, quickly losing him in the commotion.

“What’s going on?” Jowan asks.

“Some trouble,” says one of the adult mages. “Don’t worry. The Templars will take care of it.”

It’s in the whispers from the Templars in the corner that Surana hears more. Something about a Templar following a girl into the storage room, a blast of primal magic. A voice, “Well, even if it _was_ an accident, who cares if one more mage--”

Surana only sees the small body later, taken out on a stretcher, with its eyes wide and a single pale arm falling limply off the stretcher’s side.

There are a few burns, but not enough to kill. Anyone could see the girl had died of the stab wound in her gut. And still, the credulous apprentices are told later that Amell had accidentally burned herself to death firing a spell at a Templar in the storage room. It becomes a lesson, on not disobeying the Templars. On not causing trouble.

\--

Surana remembers.

Ages ago, and yet this very same day--

“I want to be alone!” he—she, Amell—screamed. “Why are you following me? _Go away!”_

And the old Templar advancing, snarling, hand on his sword. Amell, feeling something fiery flare up in her chest, and then--

“Amell?” Jowan’s voice had squeaked through the small crack in the door. “Are you alright?”

They had both gotten out, that time.

\--

When Jowan finds him, Surana realizes he’s in a corner—the very one he had met Jowan in, so many lifetimes ago. Old habits dying hard.

“Are you okay?” Jowan asks. “You look scared.”

Surana sees Jowan’s eyes are red. “Are you?”

“Yeah,” Jowan says. He hugs himself.  “And sad.”

“Why?”

“She was just a kid like us. She always looked so lonely and upset, and now they’ve--now she’s—” _And next, it could be us._

Jowan is crying. In a moment he’s crouched next to Surana in the corner, sniffling quietly. Surana lifts his hand, freezes a moment, but then lays it gently on Jowan’s shoulder.

Later, at night, they’re sharing a bed because Jowan doesn’t want to be alone tonight.  “I think you saved my life.” He says it quietly, when Jowan’s asleep, or nearly. The other boy stirs sleepily.

“Muh?” he mumbles.

“Nothing,” Surana whispers, and impulsively, hugs him, holds him close. “Just...thanks. Thanks for being my friend.”

\--

A week after the incident, they’re letting the apprentices out today, to get some exercise under the templar’s watchful gazes. Jowan had always been a pudgy, clumsy kid in Surana’s past life memories. Somehow, though, Surana manages to be worse this time around--wheezing, lungs on fire and legs feeling ready to give out after a few minutes of running.

For a moment, then, Surana’s left behind by the group--with no one but one of the older, meaner looking Templars there. The same one that had been in the storage room when Amell had been stabbed. The moment the old man so much as squints at him, though, Jowan is there, breathless, arm wrapping defensively around Surana’s shoulders.

“Hey, um,” Jowan gulps. “Let’s--a break.”

Surana’s throat tightens. It’s feeling that draws from the fear in Jowan’s voice, and it feels strangely like guilt. “Okay.”  

They end up just lying on the grass, looking at the clouds. Slowly, Surana catches his breath.

“Hey…” Surana watches a cloud shaped like a dragon float past. “D’you think...it’s a good idea to be friends with someone, if you know they’re going to die?”

“Isn’t everyone going to die?”

“Yeah, but--if you know they’re going to die soon. And you can’t do anything about it.”

“I dunno. I guess I would. But how can anyone know that?”

“Just hypothetically. Even if what you’re doing will end eventually and hurt eventually, it’s still good to do it if it makes you happy now. Um, right?”

“Right.”

They fall silent.

“So what are you thinking about now?”

Surana frowns. Flashes come back, instances of lost time, lost lives, all spent for nothing. “I just…” His throat aches again. “I wasted so much time, before, on not really _seeing_ things. Not seeing how good and noble and heroic people are… and then I just wasted time hating them.”

“Oh,” Jowan says. “I guess that’s pretty sad.”

There’s a disturbance, a splash. They both sit up, startled.

“Is that kid...making a swim for it?” Jowan says. “Wow!”

Surana facepalms, remembering. After this, they won’t be allowed outside anymore. But he looks at Jowan’s face, alight with laughing wonder, and for the first time, doesn’t think of the severed head.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Surana's first name is Eiran. He uses he/him pronouns but he's nonbinary. He looks like [this](http://imgur.com/a/ouyHo).


	8. Chapter 8

# VII.

 

**SO RIDDLED WITH LONGING**

There’s not much to do in the tower. They study together, sit together, talk together. Kid stuff, mostly. Favorite colors. Silly stories. Memories of household pets.

There are still moments of silence but they are not so heavy, anymore. Only a bit awkward. Moments where he finds Jowan staring at him as though waiting for something to happen. Moments where they both stare at each other, unsure of when to look away.

They play, too. They race to the rooms they’re expected in, mimic the games of hide and seek the other kids their age play. For Surana, it almost feels like an act. A tiring pantomime to project a normalcy he doesn’t truly feel. But other times, it doesn’t. Sometimes, it feels...free. The only good, free thing in this miserable tower.

He remembers how to play Wicked Grace, from his old lives. He teaches Jowan and it becomes fun to watch him squirm, trying to affect a blank face and instead ending up frowning comically.  Surana’s laugh bounces off the walls so loudly Surana has to cover his mouth.

But children, inevitably, grow older, and talk of different things.

“Do you miss where you came from?”

“I do.” Surana has kept his mind off it, but he lets his heart ache a bit. “I miss the air, and the open space. And being able to go anywhere without being….”

He ducks his head, and lets himself trail off, mindful of the Templars standing just around the book case. Jowan nods, understanding.

“How about you?” Surana asks.

“Um,” Jowan frowns. “Not really. I don’t remember it much, but it wasn’t like your home. Things were always cramped. I don’t think there was a lot of grass or trees, just a lot of mud.”

When Jowan asks, Surana speaks of his mother.

“She didn’t like you much, then?” Jowan asks.

“No I… I don’t know,” Surana says. “She was just tired all the time. She didn’t have time for me.”

“So when she found out you had magic, she…?”

Surana pauses, frowning. Once the townspeople had locked him in the barn, he hadn’t seen her again. Not even when he was being carted off, when he’d looked for her face in the crowd. He tells Jowan as much, quietly.

“And your mother?” Surana asks.

He sees something flicker in Jowan’s eyes. “She...didn’t like magic.”

\--

He wants Jowan to feel loved.

He realizes this late at night. His mind is working too fast, tracing over a million little memories. Jowan’s shrinking from every loud voice, the way his hands shake after being corrected. How he’s always trying so hard, re-reading every passage the instructors assign and practicing to himself only to have his spells blow up in his face anyway. He thinks about every blow Jowan’s gotten from the Templars, every stern word from the elder mages, every joke at his expense from other apprentices.

There is nothing for Jowan after all this, Surana thinks. Nothing but a stay in Redcliffe’s dungeons followed by death--or Tranquility.

He wants more, he thinks, chest aching. He wants Jowan to smile and feel proud of himself, for him to laugh and feel carefree, to feel accepted—while there’s still time for it.

Jowan deserves that, at least.

Surana is determined. He clings to Jowan, embodying protection and warmth and joy, but even so, Jowan’s eyes seem to lose a bit more light by the day. Surana can feel himself suffocating as the sand pours out the bottom of the hourglass. He feels his throat constrict during the silences between them, feels the hammer of his little bird’s heart. In the moments when they’re close, he feels his skin burn. And then, a pull, a want to get even closer, to get something more from the time they’re given.

In those moments, Surana sweats, listens to the roaring of the blood in his ears.

Surana might be a teenager, but he’s been a teenager seven times now. He’s loved and lost and reloved and relost, enough times, now, that this feels like yet another cycle to get trapped in.

There can be no reciprocation, no happy end to these feelings. There is only the dead end at the dungeon, the sudden stop and the cessation. There is only death.

Surana’s only hope is that this is a foolish twist of a lonely teenager’s heart, that these feelings will pass as time marches on.

\--

“Imagine escaping,” Surana says, staring wistfully out a high window, sometime when they’re seventeen.

He can sense the disapproval immediately. “You’re not actually thinking of trying that, are you?” Jowan asks. “I don’t want you to be locked up alone for a year. I’d lose it in here, without you watching out for me.”

“I’m not,” Surana sighs. “I just want to think about it for a moment. About where we might go.”

“Well,” Jowan mumbles. “No one out there likes mages, anyway."

Surana smiles “You don’t want a farm? A nice, peaceful farm and a wife?”

“I--what?”

He laughs at Jowan for a moment. When he turns, Jowan is pouting.

“No, really,” he says. “They _hate_ us. I mean, it’s not so good in here but--out there? Could we really live there if nobody wants us?”

Surana shrugged. “There are lots of different kinds of people out there. Maybe my mother…” He trails off. He hadn’t seen his mother, in the crowd watching him being taken away. Maybe she wouldn’t have liked magic, either. Maybe she would have been like Jowan’s mother. Maybe she would have called him ‘that thing’, too.

“There would be people out that accept you,” Surana says, changing tactics. “There would be--”

But when he sees Jowan nod, eyes red, he knows that Jowan is just humoring him. He doesn’t believe it. So Surana drops the subject.

\--

Jowan starts talking about blood magic.

“It doesn’t _have_ to be used for mind control, right?” he reasons. “If it’s just being used to make a spell stronger, then how is it any different than--“

And then he breaks off, because he sees the look on Surana’s face.

He stops talking about blood magic, and starts avoiding him. Surana tells himself it doesn’t hurt. It’s all inevitable, after all. Jowan distancing himself to learn blood magic secretly, and everything that came after…

At the very least, he knew it wasn’t personal. And yet, the sudden distance, the sudden aloneness, after this short lifetime of being each other’s best and only friends…

But Surana knows how to be alone. This, too, he can bear.

When Jowan comes to him, beaming and talking about the wonderful girl he's met, though— that is a little harder.

“It’s like you said,” he says, happier and more excited than Surana’s ever seen him. “I did find someone who would accept me.”

Surana smiles and expresses support, even as he feels slapped in the face. It’s irrational, he tells himself. He wants Jowan to be happy, for as long as he can. Just because it wasn’t him making Jowan grin like that...

He gathers himself, shoves his bruised feelings as far down as he can. He shouldn’t ruin this for Jowan. Not when there’s so little time.

\--

Surana doesn’t see it coming, when he is dragged out of bed for his Harrowing. He’s dazed from being dragged out of bed in the middle of the night, and it’s been a long time since his last Harrowing, but he remembers the parts that matter. Mouse. The Pride demon. It talks to him, and there they are, the same words from so long ago. Surana doesn’t have the patience for this.

“You’re not fooling me,” he says, interrupting. “I know what you are. A demon, and one that gives terrible advice, at that.”

The demon regards him. He can’t tell if it’s taken aback or not.  “What do you mean?”

“I never had to worry about ‘careless trust’,” Surana declares, his weak chin held high. “I never had to worry about being betrayed. I always did worse to everyone else. You were wrong.” He shifts, widening his stance. “And I’m not going to let you possess me.”

That breaks it. The Fade shatters, dissolves away, and he finds himself back in the tower.

Surana grins, despite it all, breathing hard. The lyrium in his system is making everything look strange and warped, but he’s done it. He’s out.  It had been so easy this time. Effortless. He was a much better mage than Amell had ever been.

And then he stiffens. This is wrong. Nothing is _ever_ easy. He’s learned that lesson well, repeatedly. The moment he pulls away, Irving grins, and Surana sees bloody, darkspawn teeth. He lashes out, suddenly holding an axe—his axe, their axe, Aeducan’s axe.

He feels something on his shoulder, and whips around. But it’s not some long-dead anonymous apprentice. It’s a girl with dark hair and dark eyes, tall and bony, nineteen years old if she was a day. Except that girl had died, of a stab to the gut, before ever reaching twelve.

He shakes, feeling stripped bare. Amell smooths out her robes, a dark and twisted mirror, his truest self.

“You really thought it would be that easy,” she says, amused. “But then, what do you do but the same thing, over and over again? Over and over, circling the drain, surprised each time it finally swallows you.” She snorts, a familiar sound. Surana made it just last week. He’s always had that snort. “I can’t believe you have the gall to complain about _fate._ You’re pathetic.”

Surana falls to his knees. He clings to his staff--no, their axe--his bow--her sword...

Amell clucks sympathetically and kneels down by him. “Poor dear. Trapped like a mouse in a cage.” She takes his face in her soft white hands. “I can help you, you know,” she says. “If you feel powerless to change your fate, I can give you that power. You don’t _have_ to do it all again.”

“No,” he says.

Amell changes, face distorting, flickering--a brown face, covered in tattoos, a pale face in freckles, a scarred warrior’s face. Everything rotates, as though the ground under Surana moves, and the scenery blends together as it does. The Fade shifts and changes, oscillating wildly between stone and tree and crumbling building, every lifetime grown together like a cacophonous riot of sound and sight and memory. Surana feels some inhuman sound rip out of him, and screams with seven voices at once, until the mind-straining images have stopped and faded to a platform of stone, nearly lost in fog. He pants, shaking, and grips his staff-axe-bow-sword, ready to swing. He sees a figure, jerks and lashes out--and at the last second, pulls back.

It’s Jowan.

“You’re going to let me die?” Jowan asks. “You won’t even try to save me? I thought…”

When he cuts the demon down, he sees only a flash of Amell’s face, grinning.

\--

Surana wakes up thrashing, shouting about demons, but Jowan wraps him in a hug anyway.

“It’s okay,” he says, and it’s the same words from seven lifetimes ago, but said with so much more warmth. “It’s me.”

Surana freezes for a moment, and then clutches back, eyes stinging. The last grains in the hourglass are slipping away.

Surana decides he likes Lily, even though he feels nothing but dread as Jowan introduces them. She smiles, says the same words from so many lifetimes ago, and suddenly everything converges, like double vision becoming whole again.

There had been differences leading up to this. But here he is, and Jowan’s standing in the exact same place, saying the exact same words, and Surana feels his head splitting.

“Can you help us?” Jowan asks, and he sounds afraid, so afraid. “I don’t want…”

There is, at least, a bit of satisfaction in being able to do this part again--to do it differently. “Of course I’ll help.”

\--

In the end, Jowan doesn’t give him a second glance. Lily, he turns to and tries to convince to leave with him. But Surana doesn’t even get a single lousy look.

 _He_ wouldn’t have rejected him, the way Lily is rejecting him. He would have run with him. He would have…

There is a burst of hot red, and Surana finds himself on the stone floor, finding himself unwilling to get up.

 _Since it was going to come to this,_ he thinks, _I should have, at least…_

He recognizes Greagoir’s and Irving’s voices. He doesn’t respond, and he feels a harsh kick in the side. He cringes, only to be pulled up quickly, restrained by two Templars as Greagoir and Irving stare him down.

He hears Duncan’s voice, and prepares to circle the drain, once more.


	9. Chapter 9

# VII.

 

**A GREAT AND UNENDURABLE BELONGINGNESS**

 

After that, it’s all the same.

The travel. Ostagar. Every word Duncan says, every word the king says, even every word Alistair says. By now, Surana swears he could predict the exact moment the winds would change.

Everything seems a little grayer, this time. Grayer and duller. Like he’d left the brightest thing in his life behind, and even his old friends can’t replace it, can’t take the ache away.

It’s harder to stay in the moment. Harder to listen and put on a face like he hasn’t heard all this before. Alistair doesn’t seem to notice, but Flemeth and Morrigan are much harder to fool--Morrigan quickly takes to snapping fingers in his face when he phases out. He smiles when it happens. That, at least, is a change.

All too quickly, they are once again at Redcliffe, once again outside the secret passage leading to the dungeon. He paces.

“Something the matter?” Alistair asks.

He shakes his head, and forces himself to enter.

\--

Jowan is there, as always. He is thin and bloodied, as always. This wrenching inside Surana’s chest...that’s new. Or if not new, then clearer, sharper, than ever before.

“You,” Jowan says, animated and breathless. “I never thought I’d see you again!”

Surana hears, a thousand miles away, his companions questioning how he knows this man. He cannot answer. All he can do is stand, frozen, head spinning, seeing bloodied severed heads.

In a moment, he takes a deep shuddering breath. “I can’t…” he says. _I can’t let this happen…_

His mind races. He feels himself shake, his lips tremble as he tries at the last moment to think of _something._

“Hey,” Jowan’s voice is soft. “Hey--are you alright?”

Surana clamps his jaw shut, fighting back something in his throat. He looks up, and Jowan’s eyes look soft and sad.

“I…” Jowan looks pained. “You were okay when I left? No one did anything to you?”

And then, looking in Jowan’s eyes, he knows the answer. He tightens his jaw, and breaks open the lock with a concentrated burst of force magic.

Jowan’s nature was soft, self-sacrificing, noble. The only way to circumvent that...would be to use their long friendship against him.

“Go,” Surana says, as coldly as he can manage, as cold as the snow he’d discovered his magic in. “I never want to see you again.”

Jowan stares. “But I can help.”

“I can take care of the demon myself,” Surana replies, keeping his voice under control. “You’d just mess it up.”

“But I have to help,” Jowan says. “I’m the one responsible. I have to--”

“You don’t get it, do you?” Surana asks. Tabris had been good at anger. Aeducan, too. He can remember being them, for a moment. “I don’t want your help! You betrayed me! You _lied_ to me, and then left me at the mercies of the Templars when you had what you wanted.”

He manages to hold Jowan’s expression, and watches the horror on it. Maker, he looks ready to cry. Surana feels sick.

“I made a mistake,” Jowan whispers. “I--let me make it up to you… even if it means dying, I’ll--”

“Get out!” Surana interrupts. “You don’t get to make it up--you don’t get to die. Run. Keep running the rest of your life, maleficar. If I ever see you again, I--I’ll kill you.”

Jowan looks ready to crumple. He looks at Surana a moment, pleading. There is something in his eyes, something shattering--and for a moment, Surana is _sure_ he recognizes it, sure from his decades of experience that what he sees there is heartbreak.

But before Surana can tell truth from wishful thinking, Jowan looks down, and leaves, sniffling, crying, stumbling over a loose stone and almost slamming into the door on his way out.

Surana waits for a moment, and then sits down, staring up at the ceiling. He throws an arm over his face, and heaves in a deep, shuddering sob.

\--

Jowan doesn’t come back. Surana is on edge, tension holding his small body stiff and rigid, until Redcliffe is well behind them, expecting, at any moment, to see him again--to watch him die again thereafter.

But Jowan doesn’t come back. He doesn’t die at Arl Eamon’s order. He isn’t handed over to the Templars. He doen’t die taking the Joining.

Surana doesn’t watch him die. But that doesn’t mean he’s alive. Jowan is all alone out there, without Surana to help him the way he’d helped him growing up. So much could happen to him, now; Templars, or darkspawn, or angry townspeople, or wolves. Any number of things.

But this time, at least, he won’t have to watch it happen.

 _Was it really worth it?_ says a voice in his mind, a voice he’d worn once long ago.

 _All that time, wondering--fearing--that he hated you, and you made sure he’d go to his grave thinking his best friend hated_ him.

Surana bows his head, and goes on.

\--

By the end of the year, Surana can’t stop thinking about how he’ll die this time.

When he had been Brosca, he had died pointlessly, silently, tiredly...was his challenge, this time, to struggle on, long enough to reach Wynne and live?

But what then, he thinks miserably, what then? What will he do after that? Be stabbed in a dark alleyway? Stub his toe right after the battle, get an infection from the resultant ingrown toenail, die of that? And then wake up with fresh eyes to the same old world, and do it all over and over again?

For all he’d worried over Jowan’s fate, Jowan is gone. Now, there is only Surana alone with Surana’s fate.

He is leading them to the Brecilian forest when he spots a disturbance on the road. He nods to his friends, and they assume their standard formation Sten on point, Alistair behind him, Zevran and Leliana at his flanks, Morrigan just behind him, working some vast enchantment already.

Refugees, it looks like, besieged by a small contingent of darkspawn. Better than another bloody pack of wolves, he thinks.

Surana channels life energy to his friends around him and begins sketching glyphs in the air with his oakbranch staff, and in less than a minute, most of the darkspawn are dead.

Killing darkspawn is something Surana has become eminently well-practiced at. It’s nearly...boring now, even when he doesn’t know exactly what’s going to happen.

And then, Surana realizes, that he doesn’t know exactly what’s going to happen.

He has never fought this exact group of darkspawn ever before.

For a moment, he panics, racking his mind, but he grips his staff and calms his fluttering heart. No, he’s sure of it; he’s never fought this group of darkspawn before. He’s never seen this particular group of refugees before, for not a one of their faces is familiar to him. This is new. This has never happened before.

Surana doesn’t have time to consider it, because at that moment, he sees a face across the field, a man rising from a kneeling position by one of the refugees...healing them. The man looks up, looks straight at Surana. His dark hair is longer now, and he has a beard, and the old circle robes are ragged--but that face is unmistakable.

Jowan is alive. Alive. Alive.

_Alive._

The word echoes around Surana’s skull, reverberating as he boggles.

He’s never helped these refugees before. He’s never fought these darkspawn. Jowan is here, and alive.

Something was _different._

Surana opens his mouth, to call out, to scream, to laugh, to express some tiny fraction of the wild and reckless hope blooming within him--but at that moment, Jowan’s eyes widen, in fear, in shame and guilt, and he turns away.

He turns away and books it.

Runs. Away from Surana, again. Faster, even, than he ran from the Circle.

There it is. That twisting, that wrenching. It’s there again, and Surana’s heart won’t stop beating. _Of course he ran. You said you’d kill him, if you ever saw him again. He probably thought...you were opening your mouth to curse him._

Surana sits down shakily and laughs and laughs and cries and laughs some more, until all his companions have gathered around him in concern, and Surana goes on laughing.

\--

According to the refugees they’d saved, the man who’d run’s name was _Levyn,_ and yes, alright, ser, he was a blood mage, but he only ever used it for healing and helping, and he’d done right by them, so they weren’t going to be mentioning him to any templars they happened to see, blood mage or not.

They accepted him, Surana thinks. He’d been right.

Things are different, Surana keeps thinking. Different. There had been a _change._

Afterwards, lying on the grass, he has a thought. A thought that fate is not some force of primordial nature that keeps him trapped here. Not divine mandate ensuring he pays for ever last sins, failing, or weakness.

What fate? There was none. There were only occurrences, and reasons for those occurrences. All this time, he had suffered upon the altar of inevitability, laid his neck on the chopping block willingly, believing the fall of the axe to be unavoidable. But, perhaps...he hadn’t been dying, because he’d been cursed for doing wrong. Perhaps he’d died because the world was dangerous, and death happened.

Perhaps then, if he were to do as he wished...

If Surana could save Jowan after all, he could do anything. He could abandon this errand, do whatever he liked. What would happen?

Surana looks out into the dark woods, his companions making camp behind him together with the refugees.

What would happen, would happen...

...but people were counting on him. People were dying. They would continue to die. They would die and die, until and unless Surana slew the archdemon and ended this. Jowan was helping. What would he think of Surana, if he did nothing less than his absolute best?

Fate might not shackle him, but responsibility does. Surana moves on.

\--

In the aftermath of the battle of the archdemon, Surana finds himself alone on the stars of Fort Drakon again, watching tracks of blood form on the stone. He sits, head spinning, and wonders suddenly whether a diminutive elven mage might bleed to death faster than a brawny dwarven warrior, no matter how much he might want to live on _now_.

He opens his mouth. “H-help—”

But before he manage more than a whisper, there are already steps, voices.

“Oh dear. There you are…”

“You’re bleeding! Why didn’t you tell us?”

“Here, he’s losing consciousness. Let’s get a poultice on this and get him to Wynne…”

In a blur, he sees the faces of his friends, and weeps.

They did not think to check back for an unassailable dwarven warrior, but they came back for him.

\--

It’s all too much.

The clean-up after the battle is new. The logistics of coordinating aid and identifying and burying the dead, the chaos and wonder of having won is sharp and bright and new and _real_. He’s never lived this. He’s never seen victory.

They’re calling him the Hero of Ferelden.

He wanders through the wreckage of Denerim, gleaming silver in the muck, surrounded on all sides by friends and congratulators. There are too many corpses, too much blood in the gutters, for his comfort--but there is also life, renewal in every corner.

He spots Shianni taking charge of efforts in the alienage, alive and unharmed, save for a cut on her cheek and a bloodied bandage around her arm. He sees Gorim and a dwarven woman wearily put their broken market stand in order, grumbling good-naturedly to each other.

Gorim and Shianni don’t see him, though surely if they did they’d hail him as the _Hero of Ferelden_. They’re busy. They’re living their own lives. They don’t really know him, and they don’t need him.

But someone still does.

Some days later, they throw a celebration in his honor. He drifts around the huge chamber, still suffused in that unreal-reality of experiencing something new.

There’s an uncertain crown on Alistair’s head, but...he actually deigns to speak to him. Apologizes. Awkwardly puts up with Surana’s answering hug, agrees to talk more, later. He watches him fall into conversation with Anora, watches her grimace at one of his jokes, watches him laugh in turn, and thinks--they don’t need him, either. They’ll work it out. They’ll be fine.

There’s a curiously familiar wild dog sitting in the corner of the room, looking too mangy to be anyone’s pet. He smiles, and the dog yelps at him, and allows a single pat on the head before disappearing.

He hopes she’ll be alright. There’s no knowing, anymore, but he thinks she will.

He listens to his friends chat about their plans, their futures, and the places they’ll go. They are leaving him, he thinks, heart broken. Seven lifetimes he’d given them, and just like that--they’d leave?

But the Blight is over. The thing that brought them together is over. The grains of the hourglass run out, and sooner or later...you flip it over. You start again.

No, they don’t need him. But Vigil’s Keep does, he discovers from a missive hand-delivered to him. Him, the Hero of Ferelden. The Warden-Commander. Imagine that. The Wardens need him.

And they’re not the only ones.

They ask him what he’ll do, now that it’s all over. He shrugs, says he’ll travel for a while. He needs to find someone, he tells them, and explain a few things. A lot of things. Maybe over a stiff drink.

There will be no assurances from here. The hourglass has flipped, and how the grains will fall, now—Surana can’t know. But there might be peace.

There might be love, too. Who could know?

Surana throws open the chamber doors, and faces the future.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [artwork!](http://wombuttress-art.tumblr.com/tagged/samsara)
> 
> [my tumblr](http://wombuttress.tumblr.com/)   
> [my oc blog](http://pile-of-dragon-filth.tumblr.com/)


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